The Peinture Fraîche Festival is running its 2026 edition at Site OTC in Villeurbanne, near Lyon, from 10 October to 1 November. Alongside the large-scale street-art murals, the festival offers visitors augmented reality experiences on their own smartphones that enrich certain works around the year's theme, "Invasion Los Angeles".
The two AR installations
According to the festival's published programme, there are two AR installations:
- Animated murals: the first installation covers the thirteen large murals already painted on site. Visitors scan a single QR code that gives access to all of the festival's AR experiences, and the murals then animate to reveal positive messages.
- Staged interior: the second installation is a staged space reconstructing an everyday interior. Smartphone in hand, visitors see the objects around them transform progressively. Posters, a game console, magazines, cigarette packets and other everyday objects reveal fake advertisements for contemporary services and habits that promise to simplify life, as reported by the local newspaper actu.fr from the festival programme.
The festival's new-technology strand involves eight artists, five working in video formats and three on technological installations.
Theme
The festival describes the AR universe as a way to reflect on urban planning, the arts and culture, and on possible excesses of a society marked by ultra-commercialisation, ultra-surveillance and ultra-mediatisation, questions the participating artists take up and turn into images.
